Our mission is to develop empathy, understanding and respect through testimony.

Through our research and educational programs, the Institute harnesses the power of its archive of personal testimonies from witnesses to genocide in order to do our part to build a better world. (Photo: Edith Umugiraneza, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda; and George Weiss, a Holocaust survivor.)

Please join us for an exclusive event featuring a moderated conversation and selected scenes from 'My Name Is Sara,' an award-winning feature film based on a true story of survival, produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation.…

We mourn the murder of George Floyd and join the outcry for justice in his name. He is now linked to countless others who have suffered systemic violence, injustice and hate perpetrated against African Americans throughout a 400-year history in this nation. This legacy and manifestation of hate is still present today.

The ties between Cornell University and USC Shoah Foundation are many, and now, they are permanent: The Cornell University Library has acquired access to the Visual History Archive in perpetuity. Cornell University became the 52nd site to provide full access to the archive on an annual basis in November 2015, and the impact on research and education has been significant. This impact can now continue for generations to come, as the witnesses who gave testimony had hoped.

Visit Echoes & Reflections for comprehensive programming and resources about the Holocaust especially designed for educators so they can gain the skills, knowledge, and confidence to teach this topic effectively.
On January 27, 2020, the bipartisan bill passed in the House with nearly unanimous support. Today, it passed the senate with complete support and is now on its way for the president's signature.

“You can’t just close your eyes and pretend that the history goes away,” says Mickey Shapiro the eldest son of two Holocaust survivors who just finished a four-year-long journey to create a film about his mother’s story. “I am stuck with this for life, but I think it makes me more motivated. When you hear a story like that from your parents, you want to make things better.”

The young woman stares at me as I wait to press play on the video. Her eyes are dark and her lips are pursed. You can see a bit of her thick black hair which is matted beneath an off-white, or perhaps a light-pink scarf. It is hard to tell the exact color in the shadowed room.

“I am ashamed to say this,” Ursula said to me. We were sitting in her lovely Los Angeles home in the middle of the day on a Saturday in February. All the lights in her house were off, but the blue skies outside graced her face, her 90-year-old wrinkles defined. “I was so stupid to believe that when Hitler died, that the world would come to the end.”

Stronger Than Hate, an initiative that draws on the power of eyewitness testimony to help students and the general public recognize and counter antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of hatred.